


Runaway Kids

by VYCanisMajoris



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Ducks, Fluff, M/M, Meet-Cute, Peter and Shuri are escape artists, Pre-Relationship, big brother T'Challa, good dad tony, mostly shuri cause peter just gets lost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 18:06:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14574603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VYCanisMajoris/pseuds/VYCanisMajoris
Summary: For Tumblr prompt: Tony is at a hotel with 6-year-old Peter at the same time as T’Challa who is with 6-year-old Shuri. They meet when they come to take their charge at some children activity organized by the hotel at the same time





	Runaway Kids

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters. They belong to Marvel Entertainment. Any writing is completely fan-made and I make no profit from this writing.

“Daddy,” Peter whispers, tugging on his sleeve, “Daddy, daddy, daddy-”

“Yes, sweetheart?” Tony says, crouching down to Peter’s height.

“There’s a fountain outside, with ducks in it!” Peter says, giddy and excited. He points out the floor-to-ceiling windows toward the, admittedly, impressive fountain spewing watering high into the air with small groupings of ducks swimming in the calmer middle. “Can we go look at it?”

“In a minute, Petey-Pie. Let me talk to this nice lady and we’ll go have a look, okay?”

Peter nods, absentmindedly, as he continues leaning and fidgeting as he stares out the window. Tony stands up and smiles at the receptionist, who returns the smile and exclaims, “What a cute boy you have there! How old is he?”

“Six!” Peter calls, still not looking away from the window.

“Five, but he’s turning six in a few days,” Tony corrects, keeping a sturdy grip on Peter’s hand so he doesn’t run off to the fountain. They’ve had a problem with that before, when Peter disappeared in the airport when they were picking Rhodey up. Thankfully, Rhodey found him before Tony’s heart could give out again. Apparently, Peter had snuck into the restaurant area and charmed an old lady into buying him a churro.

“And he likes animals?”

“He’s a fan of anything with wings.” Peter once tried to climb over the wall to the penguins at the zoo, but Tony caught him before he could get higher than a foot off the ground. He had to carry Peter out over his shoulder because he _refused_ to get a leash for the kid, despite the horrible “advice” from several soccer moms at Peter’s school.

“Well,” the receptionist says, smiling down at Peter, “Tomorrow the local zoologists are coming by with a few animals they’ve rescued and worked with. I hear they’ll have a few birds, maybe some owls or penguins, with them. It’s part of a fundraising event they’re doing, free to the public and especially children, if you’d like to bring him.”

“How’s that sound?” Tony asks, tapping Peter’s head. “Do you think you’d want to see all those animals tomorrow?”

Peter nods quickly, glancing between the receptionist and Tony. He focuses on Tony again and starts squeezing his hand, trying to get him to hurry up. Tony ruffles his hair, making Peter shake his head, and thanks the receptionist, who waves him off and smiles at Peter.

Once he has their room key in hand, Peter drags him away from the counter and toward the fountain, jumping and chattering about the ducks and feathers and their aerodynamics, because even Tony’s son can’t do things by halves.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It is only after Shuri has critiqued the engineering of the last set of presenters that T’Challa is able to leave the meeting. Many of the engineers loved her, with praises bubbling out of them over her smart comments, but others were somewhat upset at the designs they spent months working on being critiqued by a six-year-old who knew more than they did. Okoye will be incredibly proud, when T’Challa tells her about this later.

Shuri keeps a tight hold of his hand, eyes wide as she looks over buildings she isn’t familiar with. Somehow, he was able to convince their parents that he could watch after Shuri during their trip to California, even with his business meetings and the constant travel, and Shuri was ecstatic.

Once they have left the stuffy building, Shuri leads him down the streets toward their hotel, continually pointing out the small details she notices and talking about what she will be telling Okoye later on. T’Challa nods along, listening to her commentary move from the meeting to the buildings to the newest plans she had for her next engineering project to making fun of how T’Challa struggled to make one of the presenters understand that, yes, she was only six years old but, yes, she certainly was that smart.

“You kept repeating it like a parrot,” she says, laughing, “And that lady’s face kept getting wrinklier and wrinklier.”

“That is not a word,” he says, tiredly, “It kept getting more and more wrinkled.”

“ _You_ are not a word.”

“I… yes, that is correct. You are correct, in that aspect. I am a person.” They stop outside the hotel, and he opens the door for her and asks, “Are you this good in biology as well?”

“Obviously,” Shuri says, smiling up at him. T’Challa smiles back, until her gentle grasp turns into a death-grip as she shouts, “Cats!”

“What?” He looks up, following her shaking, pointing hand as she jumps up and down. The hotel lobby, instead of being neat and orderly as usual, is full of a mixture of things that he didn’t really expect, like a mob of people milling about and gawking at a group of zookeepers introducing a series of different animals, including a baby cheetah that Shuri drags him toward.

After letting her drag him from animal to animal with excitement, an hour has passed – an hour that should not have passed, because he was supposed to call home and reassure them that yes, he had taken great care of Shuri and didn’t let her make any engineers cry this time, and no, they were fine overseas and he would continue looking after her for the rest of the trip. Great. This call won’t end poorly.

“Shuri,” he says, taking her attention away from the owl, “I am going to call baba. Let’s find a quiet corner.”

“But the owl! It’s about to puke up its food!”

The zookeeper winces at the phrasing, but nods and gestures toward the owl once more, explaining in less graphic detail why the owl will do so.

“And I’m sure that is very interesting, but we need to call home and let them know how we are doing.”

“But the owl! What if it does it while we’re gone?”

“Then it does it while we are gone? Why would you want to watch the owl do that?”

Shuri pouts and sends a weighted, longing look toward the owl. He sighs, glancing around the room, and quietly admits defeat and says, “You stay right here, alright?”

“Yes!”

“Right here. I am going to trust you to stay _right here_.”

“I know what ‘right here’ means. You saw how I made that engineer get all red so I obviously know what words mean.”

“Yes, but I also know that you like to run and hide to scare me, so you will be right here when I am finished calling, right?”

“Of course,” Shuri promises.

She isn’t. He looks up from the phone after promising his parents that Shuri would not make any more engineers angry to find the zookeeper, owl, and several children grouped together, but not Shuri. _Oh no._ He knew it, why did he let her go? He thought she would listen, but no! She could be anywhere!

“Where did the little girl go? The one excited to see the cats?” T’Challa asks, frantic.

The zookeeper blinks, confused, and looks around himself. “I didn’t see her leave. Sorry.”

His heart sinks, and he pushes past the zookeeper and starts his rounds throughout the hotel floor. He calls out for her, searches every room, and asks each hotel worker he comes across if they’d seen a little girl with her hair in bantu knots walking around alone. With each person he asks, his heart beats a little faster, and his stomach ties itself into a tighter knot until he pushes out into the courtyard and finds Shuri sitting on the fountain.

“Shuri!” T’Challa calls, breathless and thanking the world that Shuri is alright.

She looks over to him, smiles, and waves, as if she didn’t run away and give him a heart attack to rival all other heart attacks. “Hi, brother!”

He crosses the courtyard and stops short of her. She looks up to him with a smile that slowly fades when he places his hands on his hips and asks, tersely, “What did you promise me?”

Shuri frowns, immediately on the defense, and replies, “I found this boy! He got lost, so I thought I could help him find his father! And I did!”

For the first time, T’Challa notices the two other people beside Shuri. One is a small boy, about her age, with red-rimmed, doe eyes, fluffy brown hair, and a tight grip on Shuri’s hand. The boy is the spitting image of the man next to him, who smiles at T’Challa, something that shouldn’t make T’Challa want to blush, given the amount of teasing he receives from Okoye and Nakia, and says, “Your sister really is something. She kept Peter company until I found them both.”

“I… oh.” T’Challa looks to Shuri, who raises her brows in a _told you so_ gesture, and he reminds her, “You should have told me where you were anyway. I nearly had a heart attack, Shuri.”

“He was crying!”

“Wasn’t,” the boy – Peter, was it? – mumbles, reaching up to wipe his eyes again, making T’Challa’s heart soften a little. His father ruffles his hair and murmurs something reassuring to him. T’Challa sighs, looks to Shuri, and says, quietly, “Don’t tell mother or baba about this and we will call it even, alright?”

“Yes!” Shuri nods, grinning. She grabs the boy’s hand again, and asks, “Brother, can we go look at the cats again? Peter doesn’t think they can run as fast as they can, and I need to show him.”

“Shuri, they may have things they need to do-”

“All we were gonna do is hide from Peppa,” Peter says, looking up to T’Challa with wide eyes. “She said she’s gonna kill daddy if he doesn’t stop making fun of the board’s ideas.”

T’Challa looks to the man, who blushes and says to his son, “Peter, we aren’t hiding. We are tactfully retreating, and Pepper is not going to kill me. At most, she’ll maim me and take you for ice cream to regain your love.”

“Oh. Can we get ice cream?”

“I…” the man sighs, and T’Challa interjects, “Why don’t we look at the cats?”

“Yes!” Shuri cheers. She stands up, pulling the boy alongside her. Peter follows her happily, as T’Challa and the man follow them quickly.

“I’m Tony,” the man says, holding out his hand.

“T’Challa.” He takes Tony’s hand, smiling. “Thank you for looking after my sister.”

“It was no problem – she’s a smart kid! I’ve never heard a six-year-old talk about electromagnetic fields like she did. And, well, Peter likes to run off too, though I think it’s mainly because he gets so caught up in whatever he’s focusing on that he forgets about not getting lost, so I uh…” he rubs the back of his neck, and finishes, lamely, “I understand.”

T’Challa smiles at him, going for reassuring and ending up somewhere near admiration that makes Tony blush again, then pauses, looks around them, and says, full of dread, “They’re gone.”

“Oh God.” Tony pinches the bridge of his nose. “Not again.”


End file.
